Olivia Newton

For Generation X, Olivia Newton-John's turn in "Grease" came just as they started having questions about everything sex. Tell us more, tell us more.

You can hear “Physical” a hundred times, maybe a thousand, before you really hear what it’s about, and it’s not exercise. Newton-John offered protection in the form of supernatural, lushly overproduced pop: “Come take my hand,” she sings in the hit song “Magic.” “You should know me — I’ve always been in your mind.” That was “Grease” when we first met it, and there was Newton-John in the middle of it, perhaps reckoning with this new grip she had on the preteen psyche, or perhaps not. It didn’t matter that Newton-John was pushing 30 at the time; everyone in “Grease” was far too old to be playing a high school student, and what exactly was “Grease” supposed to be anyhow, besides an underwhelming act of musical theater? Name one girl at the slumber party who didn’t own the “Grease” soundtrack. “Grease” was all those things and more, I suppose, depending on the viewer at the time.

The English Actress, Most Famous for Her Starring Role in the 1978 Musical 'Grease', Died of the Breast Cancer She Had Battled Since 1992.

Newton-John went into remission for 21 years, but the cancer returned in 2013 and again in 2017. Newton-John was born in Cambridge, England, to Brinley Newton-John and Irene Born, the daughter of Max Born, a Jewish Nobel laureate and one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Born, who was a friend of Albert Einstein, moved to England after being suspended from his position at a German university by the Nazi regime, likely saving his life.

Olivia Newton-John was one of the biggest pop stars in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the movie musical Grease, she starred as good girl Sandy Olson, ...

After other hits and other movies, she dropped out of the spotlight to raise her daughter and to devote herself to promoting environmentalism and breast cancer awareness after she was diagnosed with the disease. NEWTON-JOHN: (Singing) Let's get physical, physical. Let's get into physical. DEL BARCO: For "Let Me Be There," she won her first Grammy Award in 1973. OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN AND JOHN TRAVOLTA: (As Sandy Olsson and Danny Zuko, singing) You're the one that I want. NPR's Mandalit del Barco looks back at the life and career of the Australian singer, who is known for her sweet voice and her movie roles, especially in "Grease."

Singer Olivia Newton-John, cherished by fans for her role as Sandy in the movie 'Grease,' has died at 73 after a lengthy battle with breast cancer.

After losing her sister and battling a diagnosis herself, Newton-John became known for her advocacy to fight cancer. It was all very overwhelming,” Newton-John told the Asbury Park Press. “And I asked my mother and she said, ‘Listen, darling, if you can help somebody, then you should do it.’ That was just the most important, basic and obvious answer. Newton-John was born Sept. 26, 1948, in Cambridge, England, and moved with her family to Australia at age 5. "It was May 25th in Australia – which was our mother Irene's birthday. Newton-John relocated from England to the U.S. in 1975 at age 27. Her sister, Rona Newton-John, an actress in the 1960s and '70s, died of from brain cancer in May 2013 at age 70. “Going through loss and illness and everything is part of life, everybody’s, no one escapes it,” Newton-John told the Asbury Park Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, in 2017. She battled a third round of cancer in 2017, this time at the base of her spine. "Olivia has been a symbol of triumphs and hope for over 30 years sharing her journey with breast cancer," Easterling wrote. She married Matt Lattanzi in December 1984 and their daughter, Chloe Rose Lattanzi, was born a little more than a year later. Conaway died in 2011. If I allowed myself to go there, I could easily create that big fear.

She amassed No. 1 hits, chart-topping albums and four records that sold more than two million copies each. More than anything else, she was likable, ...

Applying the evolution of her “Grease” character to her singing career, Ms. Newton-John titled her next album “Totally Hot,” and presented herself on the cover in shoulder-to-toe leather. Despite her own treatments, she continued to release albums and tour but failed to make headway on the charts. She published a memoir, “Don’t Stop Believin,’” in 2018. After learning she had breast cancer in 1992, Ms. Newton-John became an ardent advocate for research into the disease. “Olivia Physical” won the Grammy in 1982 for video of the year. “It annoys me when people think because it’s commercial, it’s bad,” she told Rolling Stone. “It’s completely opposite. The death was announced by her husband, John Easterling. She had lived with a breast cancer diagnosis since 1992 and in 2017 announced that the cancer had returned and spread. When Ms. Newton-John was 6, her family immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, where her father worked as a college professor and administrator. Though her sales dipped as the 1970s turned into the ’80s, by early in the decade she began the most commercially potent period in her career, peaking with the single “Physical,” which spent 10 weeks on Billboard’s top perch. By the mid-’80s, her career had cooled. Later, the magazine declared it to be the biggest song of the 1980s. An entry into movies in 1978 aimed to put the singer’s chaste image behind her, starting with “Grease.” Her character, Sandy, transformed from a pigtailed square smitten with John Travolta’s bad-boy Danny to a gum-smacking bad girl.

Olivia Newton-John died “peacefully at her Ranch in Southern California this morning, surrounded by family and friends,” according to an Instagram post ...

She now Rests in the Arms of the Heavenly Father.” And also compared to what I’m listening to on the radio now, it’s more like a lullaby.” But I feel very fortunate that I had the opportunity to record it.” You were as kind and loving a person as there’s ever been. On the 40th anniversary of its release, Newton-John told Fox News the song allowed her to revamp her image from good girl to sultry siren. George Takei wrote, “We have lost a great, iconic artist in Olivia Newton John, gone too soon from us at age 73. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any donations be made in her memory to the @onjfoundation,” the social media post added. And we shared care for the environment. We will see you down the road and we will all be together again. Yours from the moment I saw you and forever! They returned to Florida and made their union legal with a beachfront wedding on Jupiter Island on June 30. We made a video at our home for the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition about pesticides and things that you have under your sink that can be dangerous for children.”

Olivia Newton-John, the Grammy-winning superstar who reigned on pop, country, adult contemporary and dance charts with such hits as “Physical” and “You're ...

Olivia Newton-John, the Australian singer whose breathy voice and wholesome beauty made her one of the biggest pop stars of the '70s and charmed generations ...

"It's probably the hardest thing I've ever experienced, and I've been through a lot of things." I've had country when when I started, then I crossed over into pop," she told CNN. "I had 'Xanadu' and 'Grease,' many songs in between. The film bombed, but its soundtrack sold well and spawned "Magic," a No. 1 hit. Thanks to a string of country and soft-rock hits, Newton-John was already a popular singer by the late 1970s. Born in Cambridge, England in 1948, Newton-John moved with her family to Melbourne, Australia, when she was five. "Olivia has been a symbol of triumphs and hope for over 30 years sharing her journey with breast cancer."

When the singer smudged her classy image, she “unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop's Olympus,” our critic writes: “The vestal vamp.”

I swore she was a parody of Newton-John’s flirty, jolly, heaven-sent persona; of her being staunchly white while adjacent to a wealth of Black and Latin music. It’s the reason she came to embody the sleek fantasies of pleasure, painlessness and profit of the 1980s. The warmth of that sound; the glorious blue-sky of it still warrants exclamation — like “oh my lord” but alternatively divine. The skates and spandex were a prop and a metaphor. Even when she was straining for eros — the way she was in the video for “ Tied Up,” in a red leather vest, her mouth seemingly in want of irrigation — you were watching an angel pursue a dirty face. That’s the reason she survived “Xanadu” — the musical belch, from 1980, with her as a Greek muse on roller skates: an imperviousness to the surrounding absurdity. That transformation unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus: the vestal vamp. I’d have to wait a whole two months, for the gatefold of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (not a dissimilar pose but with a tiger cub), to see anything as mesmerizingly erotic. She seemed to know what hers were — as a vocalist, as a dancer, as an actor. Not for John Travolta, per se, but for “You’re the One That I Want,” the duet with Travolta (and a triple-X bass line) that ends the movie. And that was something she could have some fun with, a category she could smudge. But part of the appeal, I think, was all of that name, the possible royalty of it.